Author Archive for: Henk

Fluid flows play an important role in various equipment and processes in the industry. Flows of air or water are often used for cooling purposes. To localize regions of deficient cooling or to improve the cooling performance of an apparatus insight in the cooling flow pattern is necessary. In general, information about the structure of the flow in a process or an apparatus can be obtained from measurements in experimental test facilities or from flow visualization studies. Although these techniques have proven to be of great importance, there are also limitations and a full picture of the flow field is often hard to obtain in this way. Computational Fluid Dynamics, commonly abbreviated as CFD, is a technique to model fluid flow using a computer simulation. Due to the recent rapid grow of powerful computer resources and the development of general purpose CFD software packages CFD can nowadays be applied to solve industrial flow problems. Today, CFD has already proven to be a valuable tool to complement experimental findings in flow structure studies. In a computational simulation the flow structure is computed by solving the mathematical equations that govern the flow dynamics. The result is a complete description of the three-dimensional flow in the entire flow domain in terms of the velocity field and pressure distribution, including profiles of temperature variations, density and other related physical quantities. Today’s CFD codes include in their basic flow computations effects of heat and mass transfer and a range of physical and chemical models. These extensions are indispensable for application of CFD in process-technological flow problems.